Since 2005, the volunteers behind FightAIDS@Home have helped scientists advance HIV research. The next phase of that effort is just beginning, and you can play a key role in helping the millions of people afflicted by this deadly virus.

The FightAIDS@Home project is searching for possible compounds to target the protein shell inside HIV (called the capsid core), which protects the viral RNA. Currently, there are no approved drugs that target this protein shell. In this update, Dr. Olson summarizes the team’s progress to-date, describes a new software tool that will help their work, and introduces us to a new research team member.

FightAIDS@Home researchers restarted the first phase of the project at the end of 2016, and in just a few months, they have completed approximately 46 percent of their projected work on World Community Grid. Read about their progress on finding compounds that could stop HIV from replicating.

We are happy to announce that we are re-opening Phase 1 of the Fight AIDS@Home project. In collaboration with World Community Grid, and thanks to their affiliated volunteers around the globe, High Throughput Virtual Screening will be performed by targeting the HIV-1 capsid protein with the goal of discovering new chemical compounds to defeat the AIDS virus (HIV). Read more in this update.

The FightAIDS@Home team is working with the World Community Grid technical team to create a new sampling protocol, which will more closely predict the binding strengths of potential drugs to their HIV protein targets as determined in real-life experiments. Read about this work, and other news, in this extensive update.

The research team for Phase 2 of FightAIDS@Home is developing and testing new ways to use the vast computing power of World Community Grid. Their goal is to build on the results from Phase 1 while using volunteers' resources as efficiently as possible.

We've been invited to write a chapter for an upcoming book: The Future of HIV-1 Therapeutics. Our chapter focuses on structure-based drug design, and discusses the benefits of "in silico" modeling for dramatically expanding the scope and effectiveness of structure-based research. We pay particular attention to the benefits of the large-scale computation network that we found in World Community Grid.

In this extensive update, the FightAIDS@Home team leader, Prof. Art Olson, recaps nearly a decade of progress in the fight against AIDS: new computational methods, new understanding of key HIV proteins, and huge volumes of computational results that have only begun to be explored. Though Phase 1 is winding down, Phase 2 of this enormous project will continue to advance vital research into the world's deadliest virus.

The team behind FightAIDS@Home is launching Phase 2 of the project, putting to use a more accurate simulation tool to help them determine which of the Phase 1 results merit further investigation. Phase 2 will also be applying this analysis technique at an unprecedented scale, which if proven successful, can benefit medical research not only for HIV but many other diseases as well.